Last week our Senior Manager of Business Solutions, Mike Fedorowski, presented a webinar with Meredith Lee of Avansic. The webinar was titled Streamline Your Document Review. Maybe it should have been titled Tips & Tricks to Review Faster and Smarter because it was filled with great How-To's. I thought our readers might want to hear about a few of the tips presented in the webinar. Here we go:
- Target key custodians early. These folks will have many of the relevant documents that you will find in the data sets of other custodians. The review is more consistent when you review the potentially relevant documents together rather than piecemeal. You might also be able to eliminate some custodians from the review if the levels of relevance outside the documents shared with the key custodians are low.
- Organize your review by concepts when possible. Within those custodians' document sets, use data concept categories to further focus the review. Coding is more accurate and reviewers are more efficient when they are focusing on a single idea. When reviewers are required to multi-task, they waste time moving between ideas, and lose their concentration.
- Communicate. Learning takes place throughout the review. Make sure you have a way to easily share new information. eDiscovery software that includes collaboration tools, like messaging capabilities within the platform, and the ability to send emails to team members who aren't currently online, encourage communication. Look for that in your litigation support tool and use it.
- Force actions when necessary. If you need a privilege reason attached to each document coded as privileged, or an issue when it is tagged relevant, make sure your tool requires that additional information each time the tag is applied.
- Consider using Artificial Intelligence. Predictive coding is still underutilized. First, realize that TAR is not a widget, it is a workflow with AI in the background. It isn't designed to make decisions for you, it makes recommendations based on reviewers' previous decisions. Let smart machines help you, especially with large document sets and quick turnaround times.
Get these and several other tips in our recently-released piece Streamlining Your Discovery: A Reviewer's Guide to Smarter eDiscovery